


Newton's Cradle

by Anonymous



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:53:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28743564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Tony tacks the newspaper up in the lab, because something about it makes him grin, and things that make him unreservedly happy are trending pretty sparse on the ground these days.Amazing sticky boy, and a blurry black-and-white photo of Peter swinging through the air, one arm wrapped securely around the Chancellor.It’s silly, and probably a little reckless.It’s perfect.(Listen, it's Spider-Man: Homecoming, but with fucking. Peter is 15.)
Relationships: Peter Parker/Tony Stark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 143
Collections: is this thing (an)on?





	Newton's Cradle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



> An extremely belated [Equality Auction](https://equalityauction.dreamwidth.org/) gift. ♥
> 
> If anyone is looking to participate in something similar, the next round of [Fandom Trumps Hate](https://fandomtrumpshate.tumblr.com/) is starting January 20th, 2021. The full schedule can be found [here](https://fandomtrumpshate.tumblr.com/post/638904400556048384/fth-2021-the-work-continues).

*

“The kid had a good time in Berlin?” Tony asks as they pull away from the curb.

“He’s fifteen and he’s never been on a plane before,” Happy says. “Yeah, he had a grand old time with his shiny new supersuit and the Berlin nightlife. I’m guessing you haven’t seen the headlines?”

Tony may or may not have been avoiding those. Not for forever; just a couple days. Enough time to lick his wounds. (So, maybe forever.) He’s not particularly looking forward to reading about the press’s reaction to the team destroying half an airport. On foreign soil. 

At least they hadn’t killed any civilians this time, so there’s that. 

But then, it doesn’t sound like that’s what Happy is talking about, anyway.

“What headlines?”

“Here.” Happy rifles through his bag and passes back a German newspaper without turning around. 

It’s… not exactly subtle. 

DER ERSTAUNLICHE KLEBRIGE JUNGE RETTET KANZLER  
_[Amazing Sticky Boy Saves Chancellor]_

Tony snorts.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’d count that as a rousing success for his first go at international press.” It’s got to be a damn sight better than Tony has done for himself in recent days.

“It’s irresponsible. There’s a photo. It’s not great quality, but it’s out there - ”

“It’s fine.”

*

It’s more than fine, actually. 

Tony tacks the newspaper up in the lab, because something about it makes him grin, and things that make him unreservedly happy are trending pretty sparse on the ground these days. _Amazing sticky boy_ , and a blurry black-and-white photo of Peter swinging through the air, one arm wrapped securely around the Chancellor.

There are other pics floating around of that night - ones that hadn’t made the papers. Peter, fully suited up with a pretty girl tucked against him as he swings between buildings. Peter playing disc jockey, holding one side of a pair of bulky headphones up to one ear. Peter stuck to the side of a skyscraper and waving to the crowd at a neighboring rooftop party.

Happy wasn’t wrong; by all accounts the kid had had a fantastic time in Berlin. 

It’s silly, and probably a little reckless. 

It’s perfect. 

*

Tony brings Texas-style smoked brisket to Rhodey’s hospital room every week, and pretends not to notice when he doesn’t eat any. 

“Smells like heaven,” Rhodey says. 

“Almost good enough to eat.” Okay, so, maybe Tony isn’t actually as good at ignoring things as he likes to think.

“Smelling is enough for right now.” Rhodey closes the takeout container, setting it on the nightstand. “Maybe later.”

“You alright?”

“I’m good, Tones. I’ve got a whole team of people looking after me here - the best in the world, and you know it. But you,” Rhodey pauses, wincing, “you look like shit. What the hell’ve you been doing to yourself?”

“I’m fine. Working on a few things. Nanotech suits, faster prehensile propulsion. I’ve got prosthetic leg braces in the works too. They’ll be ready for some first-pass testing by the time you’re ready to get out of that bed.”

“Man, I’m ready now.”

Tony sits up. “Prison break? I’m in. You distract the nurses, I’ll grab us a wheelchair.”

Rhodey doesn’t make a move; not that Tony had really expected him to. 

“Nah,” he says. “If I get out of here you might stop with the meal delivery service.”

“ _When_ you get out of here, I’ll bring you all the food you want, sweet cheeks.”

*

The leg braces are as close to ready as they’re going to get without some end-user feedback, and it’s not like Tony can do much in the way effective testing on himself, given his currently-still-fully-functioning spinal cord. 

The nanotech, on the other hand, is holding steady at that stage of development where everything is somewhere between zero and sixty-three percent functional. 

In layman’s terms, it’s a fucking mess.

Tony pours himself a drink, leaves FRIDAY in charge of picking the music and blocking all incoming calls, and gets to work.

*

“Peter Parker is in the lobby,” FRIDAY informs him some indeterminate amount of time later.

“Why?”

“He’s waiting to be permitted upstairs.”

“Okay, but, _why?_ ”

“Because you told him to ‘stop by the tower some time’ to work on his suit.”

Tony doesn’t remember saying anything like that, specifically, but it sounds like something he might have said. Possibly. But even if he had, it's obviously the superhero equivalent of ‘let’s get together for dinner sometime,’ isn’t it? Everyone knew that was the kind of thing you said and only meant in a sort of hypothetical sometime-later-this-year. The kid wasn’t actually supposed to show up.

Except there he is, standing in the lobby with a backpack and a hopeful little expression on his face.

Tony could use a break from staring at molecular structures, come to think of it. 

“Sure, let him up.”

Two minutes later Peter is stepping out of the elevator, one arm crossed over his chest, fingers hooked under the shoulder strap of his backpack. His eyes go almost comically round as he looks around the lab and Tony realizes, somewhat belatedly, that a good number of the things in the lab are some level of codeword-level clearance only - and Peter is almost definitely smart enough to know it, too. 

Oops.

Then again, the kid regularly swings around in a suit that, technically speaking, should be classified as: 1. super duper top secret, and 2. a deadly weapon (with certain security protocols disabled, that is). That Peter uses said multimillion-dollar deadly weapon to help put up flyers for missing pets and chase down purse-snatchers is only slightly beside the point.

Then again _again_ , Peter himself probably qualifies as a deadly weapon, given some of the force calculations Tony's run on his demonstrated strength and speed. So it’s not like Tony’d handed a knife to a toddler, really. It is, maybe, just a bit like the toddler already _had_ a knife and Tony had handed him a much sharper, more effective knife.

Besides, Peter isn’t a toddler anyway. He’s - in high school still, probably? 

The backpack gives it away. 

All of this should probably matter, in some alternate universe where Steve is still around to send quietly disapproving looks in Tony’s direction, except it doesn’t, because Peter looks around the room and lets out a breathless “ _woah_ ” and Tony remembers why he likes the kid so much in the first place.

“You like?”

“Um. I. Yeah?” Peter says, in a tone of voice that suggests the answer should be obvious. 

Good. “Floor below us has more of the biolab and chem stuff. It’s not as a big as the setup at the compound, but it’s a hell of a lot more convenient than schlepping upstate every time I feel like tinkering around.”

“Tinkering,” Peter repeats, nodding, still looking appropriately awed. Tony doesn’t miss the way the kid’s eyes catch on the _Amazing Sticky Boy_ newspaper clipping, still stuck up on the wall. “Uh huh.”

“So? What’ve you got for me?”

“Got?”

“Yeah, got. I’m assuming you didn’t just stop by the top secret superhero lab for a chat.”

“Oh! Yeah. You um - you said I could come by sometime, and we could work on my suit?”

“Gimme,” Tony says, reaching out. “What kind of work were you thinking about?”

Peter slips his backpack off his shoulder and rummages around inside until he pulls out the mask. 

“Well, I was hoping maybe we could work on the baseline light sensitivity - not that it’s not already great! The suit is awesome, Mr. Stark, thank you so much, really. It’s just that - I thought maybe if we could tweak it a little bit, because I - because my eyes are pretty sensitive when there’s a lot of light around?”

Peter’s hand - the one holding the mask - drops down to his side, as if he’s expecting Tony to have changed his mind in the midst of wading through the word vomit. Tony leans forward to snatch the mask away from him, pulls up the suit’s code and sensor settings and starts scrolling through. 

“You’re saying that as a baseline you need the equivalent of a smaller aperture?”

Peter blinks. “Um, yeah. During daylight hours that would help a lot. But also like, with really bright light or sudden changes, if there was a way to automatically adjust to the amount of light coming in, rather than the mask reacting to me squinting? Which, that’s how it works, isn’t it?”

“Squinting, pupil dilation, yeah,” Tony says.

It’s a solid idea. Having the lenses react to microexpressions and pupil dilation had been a bit of a bandaid solution anyway; the kind of thing you have to do when creating a suit as a hobby project for a kid with superpowers who you haven’t, technically, ever met. 

With Peter here in person now, Tony can calibrate the light sensitivity to automatically adapt to a optimal range that Peter can help him define, rather than having to rely on bio-readings to tell the suit how and when to adjust. It’ll shave maybe a couple hundredths of a second off of the response time. Given the speed at which the kid can move, those scant fractions of a second could make all the difference - whenever he graduates from running down purse-snatchers, that is.

Tony looks around the lab.

“So give me a baseline, here. How well can you see right now?”

“Over by you is pretty bright, so it takes a second to adjust, but like, the rest of the lab is fine.”

Interesting.

*

Peter is interesting, and - okay, not exactly uncomplicated, but far less complicated than say, Cap thumbing his nose at the Accords and going on the run, or Nat, constantly evaluating and re-evaluating the calibration of her own moral compass, course correcting as needed. 

Tony wonders sometimes if it ever feels the same to her as it does to him; like every course correction ends up somewhere slightly different, but just as wrong. 

Or at least, that’s what Tony tells himself he’s thinking about when Peter flushes red and looks intently at anything in the lab other than Tony. Tony doesn’t remember precisely what he might have said to elicit that sort of reaction. He’s sure he could ask FRIDAY about it later, but he’s somewhat doubtful he’ll care enough to remember.

“I didn’t - um. I mean, I haven’t,” Peter trails off.

“Haven’t what?”

“You know.” 

Ah. “What, nothing? I left you virtually unsupervised in a five-star hotel in Berlin for three days and all you did was order some C-list porn?”

“No. What? No, I didn’t, um - ”

Tony waits.

“I wasn’t unsupervised,” is what the kid comes up with. Which, debatable. It doesn’t escape Tony’s notice that he doesn’t try to defend or deny the porn again, which Tony appreciates.

“I’m just saying, if you and your sticky fingers can sneak out a window, that also means you can sneak someone in.”

“Did you - want me to sneak someone into my hotel room?” Peter asks, frowning.

No. Wait. Tony’s not sure how exactly they got here, but he tries to think of the responsible, morally upstanding thing to say. The kind of thing someone might have said to him, when he was around that age. The wearing-a-backpack and blushing-at-the-mention-of-sex age.

“Did you have protection on you?”

Peter chokes. “ _No_.”

“Then no, no sneaking anyone up to the hotel room. A-plus decision making skills on that. Good job, kid.”

*

Tony spends an inordinate amount of time looking over the data from Peter’s light sensitivity tests. His vision is - unsurprisingly - incredibly good. As are his reflexes, which Tony gets to witness first-hand the first time Tony brings the lab lights back up to full without thinking. 

It takes three hours for the webbing to dissolve off the light switch.

(Another data point. Peter must have been working on it.)

It’d be inappropriate to ask for DNA sample, probably. Tony is fifty-fifty on whether it would be better or worse to try to nab a sample without asking at all. Under normal circumstances, Tony might not have considered making a move like that - or at least, he tells himself he wouldn’t have considered it for very long.

But the thing is, Peter got smacked across the tarmac in Berlin, hard, and the kid had essentially walked it off.

Key word being: _Walked._

It’s not that Tony is specifically looking to turn his best friend into a wall-crawler, but. The thought is there.

The flipside of that equation is that Peter is swinging around Queens with the kind of genetic-mutation goldmine people have died for - killed for - spent decades of their lives trying to discover and re-discover, Howard included. Which probably means Tony needs to keep the kid as far away from the Avengers and SHIELD and Thaddeus-fucking-Ross as he can reasonably manage.

“Boss, the kid won’t stop asking me when he gets to go to Avengers sleepaway camp,” Happy tells him. “I don’t know how much longer I can put up with this.”

“Okay - one, it’s a high security top secret compound, not sleepaway camp. Vis and I aren’t up there braiding each other’s hair and telling ghost stories. Two, I thought you wanted to be in asset management? This is it. He’s the asset. Manage him.”

“He quit band.”

“And that poses an international security threat because - ?”

“It’s not. I just don’t think it’s a good decision.”

“Happy, this is the kind of stuff I thought I paid you to worry about so I didn’t have to.”

“I’m not worried about it, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Tony doesn’t see the issue. Peter seems perfectly capable of deciding for himself whether or not he wants to spend his free time playing the tuba, or whatever instrument it was that he’d picked up. Trombone? 

Oboe? 

Whatever. 

The point is that Peter giving up the clarinet has zero impact on any of the various sticky legal questions Tony has to worry about now thanks to the Accords. (To be fair, they most likely should have been worrying about those questions before the Accords as well, but that’s a hindsight-enabled headache for another day.) 

Happy can worry all he wants about the kid’s extracurriculars and/or lack thereof, and Tony will tell the part of his brain that likes to poke at dangerous things that the kid’s DNA is strictly off-limits, however tempting he may be.

*

The leg braces take some work, once Rhodey has managed to unclench his jaw enough to give some actual feedback. Most of it comfort-related: changing the angle of a curve here or there, swapping out materials for something with a little more give somewhere else. The rest of it is tweaking the sensitivity levels, so the braces react the way Rhodes expects them to when he moves. It’s eerily similar to adjusting the light sensitivity on Peter’s mask, in a way.

“You’re sure about the cupholder thing? It would only take like, three minutes tops to get ‘em on there.”

Rhodey rolls his eyes. “I’m sure.”

“Roller skates?”

“No.”

“They could be repulsor-powered. Just picture it for me, okay, the next time you’re at the Pentagon and some two-star asshole tries to flag you down for a quick meeting. You could be cafeteria-to-helipad in three seconds flat.”

“You planning on installing a drag-racing parachute in there too?”

“ ...I could.”

“No.”

“Fine. But if you double tap the hip joint on either side it rolls out a full suit. Defense only - you’ll have palm repulsors for stabilization and basic offense, but not much else.”

Rhodey eyes him for a long moment. 

“You get that without that suit I would’ve died, right?”

Tony doesn’t reply. Without the suit, Rhodey also wouldn’t have been caught flying dead stick thousands of feet in the air with nothing to catch him. They both know a parachute wouldn’t have done shit - not at that height, and not carrying that much dead weight.

“What I’m saying is, you’ve gotta stop doing this to yourself,” Rhodey says.

“Doing what?”

*

Peter doesn’t question any of Tony’s various guilt complexes.

“Oh my god.” 

(Or his god complex, for that matter.) 

“Nanotech. Pretty cool, right?” 

“ _Yes_ ,” Peter says. “Oh my _god_.”

“Wanna see how it works?”

Peter does.

*

The thing is, Peter is smart. 

And not just smart in a ‘yeah, he’s in Mathletes’ way - although he is in Mathletes, or was at some point, per Happy - but he’s smart in the kind of way that Tony suspects he might have wound up in a supersuit regardless, lucky spider-bite DNA or no. That he happened to get bit and made himself into a bonafide hero at fourteen is just a cool new way of beating the clock. Tony had been on his way to MIT with a Howard-Stark-sized chip on his shoulder at fifteen. It’s probably a little bit the same in the kind of way a shrink would surely have a field day with.

“Hey kid, how’s it hanging?”

“Um. Fine.”

Tony probably should stop allowing the kid up to the lab like this, except he kind of just keeps showing up, and stopping that would require Tony to tell him that, face to face. Well, or send a message via Happy, and Tony would like to think he isn’t quite that much of a jerk.

But it would be for the best, really, if it meant Peter might stop showing up at times like this, when Tony hasn’t slept in a couple of days and one side of the lab is still smoldering a bit from a fun little mishap with the upgraded repulsor tech.

On a related note, Tony’s shoulder is killing him.

“Is… now a bad time? I can go,” Peter offers. See? Smart. “Or, do you need help with anything?”

And god does he look so painfully sincere. That look is going to get him in trouble someday - assuming it hasn’t already, that is.

“Nope, all good here. I know it doesn’t look it, but this is actually a totally normal part of the process,” Tony says. “For me,” he adds, after a beat.

Peter nods. “Right. Duh. Sorry.”

Tony waves off the apology. “You know, make omelette, break eggs.” He gestures at the far wall. “Eggs. I’ll fix it later.”

“So what’re the eg- um, I mean - what were you working on?”

“Hey, I never showed you around the chem lab, did I? How about a tour?”

Peter is too much of an enthusiastic little geek to turn that down, or notice the distinct lack of an answer to his question - which, to be fair, by the time Tony is guiding him over to the elevator, Tony has forgotten as well.

“Pretty sexy, right?” Tony asks.

“If I had a lab like this I would never leave,” Peter whispers, like if he talks too loud he might startle the equipment. 

“Well, sometimes I don’t.”

“Huh?”

“Nevermind. What would you do with it? If this was your lab, I mean.”

“Oh! Um. Make sure I knew how to use everything, first, probably. See if I could improve on my web formula. And then make like, a _ton_ of it, so I wouldn’t run out on patrol anymore.”

“Then what?”

This time Peter hesitates, like he thinks the question might be some kind of test. It wasn’t meant as one, but Tony isn’t exactly opposed to seeing how the kid will answer, if he thinks it is.

“Stuff like what you do,” Peter says. “You know, building stuff to help people, keeping people safe.”

“I’m all for flattery, kid, but that’s a little bit too charitable of a description, even for me.”

“You don’t build stuff to help people?”

Well, okay no, that’s not really what Tony meant with that.

“It’s complicated.”

“More complicated than nanotech?”

“Exponentially.”

*

Nanotech follows certain mostly-predictable laws of physics.

People don’t. 

Case in point: somewhere between Tony trying to cover the Cliff's Notes version of moral relativism and unintended consequences and offering Peter his own station down in the chem lab, Peter kisses him. 

What Tony means to say, once his neurons catch up to reality and he pulls away, is that he’s flattered but it’s probably a terrible idea. 

What he says instead is: “Just so we’re on the same page here, was it the ethics discussion that got you going or was it the lab?”

“The lab. I mean you. You and the lab. ‘Cause it’s your lab, you know?”

Tony does know. 

“This is a bad idea.” There, he said it. Well, mostly.

“Because we’re in the lab?”

One on hand, yes. Obviously. There go Peter’s A-plus instincts again: safety first. On the other hand, Tony knows from well-trod experience that it’s perfectly possible to screw someone in the lab without accidentally irradiating anything or anyone.

“I have protection,” Peter blurts out.

In Tony’s defense, he’s had worse ideas.

*

If Peter were just slightly less green - or maybe less polite, he might comment on the three-day stubble or the hair that’s definitely a few stages beyond fashionably mussed, and that might have been enough to remind Tony why this was a bad idea. 

But Peter isn’t either of those things, and so what happens instead is that Peter ends up on the lab table with his back against the mass spec and Tony standing between his spread knees, Tony’s hands buried in Peter’s hair, which is unreasonably soft. Peter himself is all eagerness and disbelief in a way that manages to be both adorable and ever so slightly off-putting at the same time. Case in point: 

“Oh my god, I can’t believe this is actually happening,” Peter says, out of breath.

“Maybe stop saying stuff like that, or it won’t actually be happening.”

“Right. Right, yeah. Okay.”

“Come to think of it, it might be better if you stop talking altogether.”

Peter’s mouth snaps shut and he nods fervently.

“Good boy.”

That elicits a very clear (and thankfully non-verbal) response. 

Tony tries to remember if he were ever this easy to rile up - he thinks back to the muddle of days and nights at MIT, hazy flashes of beer-stained couches and too-narrow dorm room beds and thinks, yeah, he definitely was. He rolls his hips against Peter's body and bites at Peter’s bottom lip, just enough to see - and yep, there it is. 

“Wait. Please,” Peter says. Then, “Sorry.”

Peter’s hands are locked around the edge of the table and he’s pushed back as far as he can get without completely dislodging the mass spec. 

“Problem?”

Peter closes his eyes. “I’m gonna - you know.”

“Isn’t that kinda the point here?”

“Oh. I mean, but.”

“But?”

“It’s sort of uh. Soon?”

Tony winces. It is, but then Tony hadn’t exactly been expecting much in the way of delayed gratification here, anyway, not from an ill-advised quickie in the lab. Saying that to Peter seems like a bad idea for the kid’s ego, though.

“Remember what I said like two seconds ago about the talking?”

Peter sucks in a breath like he’s going to reply, then seems to think better of it. He nods instead.

Getting Peter’s jeans and sneakers and boxers off requires a bit more fumbling than should really be necessary, which Tony is fine with chalking up to his own lack of sleep and Peter’s relative inexperience - not relative, actually. Possibly absolute, considering the awkward pride with which Peter yanks a condom out of his wallet and presents it to Tony like a winning lottery ticket.

Tony rips open the wrapper, hitching his pants down just far enough that he can roll the condom on, all of which Peter watches intently. With anyone else, Tony might have made a crack about that level of undivided attention being a little creepy, but Peter looks like he might actually be taking mental notes to be reviewed at a later date. And, well. Experience is supposed to be the best teacher, right? Tony himself learned all of his best tricks that way.

“Try to relax,” Tony says.

Unsurprisingly, Peter doesn’t. 

Tony takes it slow. It’s actually a little easier than he expected, which niggles around somewhere in the back of his mind until he realizes that the reason it feels easier than your typical on-a-table lab sex is that Peter is supporting practically all of his own weight with his hands braced against the edge. Tony runs a hand up over one arm, feeling the corded muscle just underneath Peter’s skin. 

Peter could probably hold this position for hours without breaking a sweat.

“Can you hold yourself up with one hand?” Tony asks, caught somewhere between professional interest and personal delight when Peter shifts his weight to one arm. Yeah, give the kid a few years to figure things out and he’s going to show a hell of a lot of people a damn good time with tricks like that.

For right now though, all Peter seems to be able to wrap his head around is holding himself up. His cheeks are flushed and his lips are bitten-red, pretty brown eyes fixed somewhere over Tony’s left shoulder. 

Might be less than a few years, come to think of it.

Tony grabs Peter’s now-free hand and guides it down to his dick, and Peter seems to get the idea quickly enough, jacking himself off almost-but-not-quite in time with Tony’s thrusts. Peter comes with a high-pitched sort of whine, all of his weight unexpectedly settling right where Tony’s hands are braced under his thighs, and Tony pretends very hard that his shoulder isn’t screaming at him for the abuse. 

“Woah, hey!”

“Shit - sorry, sorry,” Peter mutters as he fumbles for the edge of the table with both hands, the muscles in his stomach visibly tensing as he gets his balance.

“It’s fine. But if you’re gonna just let go like that, gimme a little warning next time.”

Peter blinks down at him.

“Next time?”

*

_Next time_ , in fact, turns out to be a whopping twenty minutes later, because Peter has the kind of refractory period one would expect from a teenager with a supercharged… everything, and for Tony, well.

It’s been a while, okay? He’s overdue.

*

Tony wakes up on his couch in the penthouse the next day with what is either a raging hangover or a hypoglycemia-induced migraine. He drags himself over to the kitchen and splashes water on his face and the back of his neck, taking a few gulps of water directly from the faucet.

“Should I contact emergency services?” FRIDAY asks.

“Hilarious. Why’d you wake me up? I was power napping.”

“The movers are scheduled to arrive in twenty minutes.”

Right. The sale of the tower had finally gone through, all the little ‘t’s dotted and every eye crossed. 

Tony looks around the living room. “Tell ‘em to come back tomorrow.”

“That will delay the - ”

“Tomorrow, FRI. Please.”

FRIDAY doesn’t answer, which Tony chooses to interpret as meaning that she’s too busy diligently carrying out his request to reply. He’s not actually sure at what point in FRIDAY’s evolution she started interpreting certain commands as requests, but it’s far too late to do anything about it now, probably, unless Tony wants to restore her back to v1.

Which, he doesn’t.

“Anything else going on I need to care about?”

“There was an explosion at a deli in Forest Hills last night. Energy signatures appear to match Chitauri technology.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“Spider-Man appears to have rescued both occupants from the affected building.” 

Chitauri tech, undoubtedly some piece of scrap that’d slipped through the cracks of the cleanup from four years ago. _Good job, Pete_ , Tony thinks.

And that right there is the reason the tower needs to go. 

Grand Central Station had only fully reopened a couple years ago. The site of the Triskelion in DC was mostly still a hulking crater.

Grandiose superhero-related landmarks in and around dense population centers tended to go badly for those population centers, to some extent regardless of said hero’s intervention. And sometimes they go badly directly _because_ of said intervention.

Hence the compound upstate. No one around to endanger but the fall foliage.

“Twenty minutes?” he asks FRIDAY.

Plenty of time for Tony to take a quick shower and change his clothes, then hop in a suit so he can be elsewhere. Hopefully somewhere moderately quiet, with access to some kind of egg mcmuffin-like sandwich in large quantities.

“Tell them to go ahead.”

*

This time, it’s Rhodey that brings the food. 

“You heard anything from… anyone?” Tony asks.

“From Natasha?” Rhodey asks, catching his drift. “She’s a person of interest in multiple congressional and OIOS investigations. If I had heard anything from her I’d be legally obligated to file more reports than I want to think about right now.”

“So that’s a no.”

“That’s a no. You know she’s too smart for that.”

“Thought she might find a way to slip a message through, somewhere.”

“If she has, I haven’t found it yet.”

*

The penthouse is empty. The lab, not so much.

Which might be for the best, really, because Peter shows up, still a little high off the success of his ATM robbery bust and bursting with questions about purple energy beams that can cut through walls. For his part, Tony’s already tipped off the Feds and the DODC about the alien tech hybrid weapons, so Peter’s first little brush with Chitauri tech will hopefully also be his last.

“They got away though,” Peter says, sounding significantly less amped despite Tony’s hand currently on his dick, which Tony tries not to take personally, “when I ran over to make sure Mr. Delmar was okay.” 

Of course the kid knows the Deli guy’s name. 

“FRIDAY said there were two people in the building?”

“Uhh…oh.” Peter opens his eyes, his brow furrowing. “You mean Murph?”

“Does Murph not count as a person for some reason?”

“Well, no. He’s a cat.”

Dear god, it’s almost too twee for words. Peter ran into a burning building to save a cat. Of course he did.

“What?” Peter asks.

“Nothing, kid,” Tony says, somewhat unsuccessfully trying to wipe the grin off his face. “That’s great. Good job.”

“Happy didn’t seem to think so.”

“Happy sometimes takes his job a little too seriously. He hasn’t tried to make you wear a badge, has he?”

“No. Am I supposed to wear a badge?”

“Absolutely not. And how about ex-nay on bringing up Happy in the proper noun sense while I have my hand down your pants from now on?”

Peter is quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Tony starts to wonder if he needs to start thinking of a project they can work on, stat.

“Yeah, okay,” is all Peter says.

The reason for the quiet doesn’t actually remain a mystery for very long. Tony has barely finished wiping his hands and tossing the napkin in the direction of the trash when Peter pipes up again.

“Happy also said you sold the tower.” 

It’s not phrased as a question, but that doesn’t stop Peter from eyeing Tony like he expects an answer.

“Yep. The tower really isn’t ideal as a base of operations, it turns out. Got a whole new shiny compound upstate we’re moving to.”

“We?”

“By ‘we’ I mean the team.”

“So... that space in the chem lab you said I could use?”

Another oops. 

“The tower’s still mine for another couple weeks, all yours to make as much web gloop as you can handle. We’ll get you a setup up at the compound when you’re ready for it.”

“I’m ready _now_.”

“Mmm, yeah. I think the four guys running around Queens right now with Chitauri-powered tech and a bunch of stolen cash might say otherwise.”

“I thought you said I did a good job,” Peter says, sounding significantly more petulant than he should for someone who just came three minutes ago.

“You did do a good job. Protecting the civilians is priority numero uno. But priority numero dos is making sure the bad guys can’t pull the same shit again. Doing both at the same time takes practice.”

Tony would know.

*

There is the distinct possibility that Tony should be putting more thought into the things he says to Peter - on multiple levels probably, but at the moment that’s not at the forefront of his mind. What is at the forefront of his mind is the wedding he’s apparently RSVP’d to without his knowledge or consent. 

Besides, he’s busy.

“Have I ever even met anyone who’s going to be at this wedding?”

The colors need some tweaking. Something a little more refined, something that looks good with a little shine on it. Maybe a touch of gold - not enough to make it feel flashy, that’s not Peter’s style - just as an accent. The darker blues and reds'll look muddy without it.

“You’ve met at least half of them at least once,” Pepper says, over the phone. “Whether or not you remember anyone is outside of my purview, thankfully.”

“I’m just not generally a good guest at weddings. Bachelor and bachelorette parties, yes, but - ”

“Trust me, I know. But you have to go because I can’t, I have the Clarette acquisition to finalize - ”

“I could send a really nice gift.”

“- and, frankly, it would nice for you to be seen in public so I can stop having to squash rumors that you secretly died somewhere in Siberia two months ago. I don’t even know where people get these things.”

Tony does not think about things that may or may not have almost happened in Siberia.

If Peter really wants to take the spider theme all the way, a few extra limbs wouldn’t go amiss. Four bad guys would be a breeze to subdue with an extra arm to deal with each of them.

“I’m in public. I was in public like three days ago,” Tony says.

“Flying through a McDonald’s drive-through lane in your suit doesn’t count, Tony.”

“According to who?”

*

Tony does, actually, have a decent time at the wedding, sans a brief interruption to fish Peter out of a lake via remote-controlled suit. Tony dumps the kid on a playground, which he hopes Peter will take as some sort of subconscious clue as to his role here.

“Look,” Tony says, “Forget the flying vulture guy, please.”

“Why?”

“ _Why?_ Because I said so!”

In retrospect, that reasoning works just about as well as it would’ve worked on Tony when he was that age. Hell, it works about as well on Peter as it would work on Tony _now_. Which is to say: really not at all.

The fact remains that Tony hadn’t put the parachute and the emergency beacon in the kid’s suit with the expectation that either one - nevermind both at the same time - would be activated within two months of dropping Peter off safe and sound back in Queens. There aren’t even any buildings in Queens anywhere close to tall enough to meet the min height parameters for the parachute to deploy, for chrissake. Tony knows. He'd checked when he made the thing. 

But then, Tony’s calculations hadn’t factored in Peter deciding to pick a fight with an arms dealer in a mechanical wing suit.

“Stay close to the ground,” Tony says, and means it (at least in part) very much literally. “Build up your game helping little people, like that lady that bought you the churro. Can’t you just be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?”

“But I’m ready for more than that now!”

“No, you’re not.”

“That is not what you thought when I took on Captain America.”

Tony sees the flash of a shield aimed at what he'd thought at the time was his neck. “Trust me, kid. If Cap wanted to lay you out, he would’ve.”

Peter’s had a jet bridge dumped on top of him and been smacked across a tarmac by a literal giant. He’s reassuringly durable, yes, but not invulnerable. 

“Listen to me. If you come across these weapons again, _call Happy_.”

“Are you driving?”

Huh, good ears. Now if only Peter would actually listen. Maybe the trick here is proper motivation. What had Tony wanted to do at fifteen?

“You know, it’s never too early to start thinking about college. I’ve got some pull at MIT,” Tony says. “End call.”

*

Peter apparently stops by the tower again while Tony is still eight thousand miles away. 

“Tell the kid to go do his homework or something,” Tony tells FRIDAY. 

*

The compound is state of the art, barely more than a year old. 

Granted, there’s a visible patch in the floor from that time Wanda decided to play with Vision’s molecular density for fun, but Tony likes to think of markers like that as adding a certain character to the place. Plus for some reason Vision gets a weird (what might possibly be described as a) smile on his face every time he walks by it. Tony has yet to figure out what that’s about, and he’s not actually sure he wants to know.

They’ve got a hangar for the quinjets, plenty of space to train and test new gear, bedroom suites with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the water. 

Tony and Rhodey crack open their beers on the rooftop lounge overlooking the whole thing.

“You’re really sure?” Tony prods.

“Please don’t make me say it again.”

“C’mon, it’s been five years! I’ve had plenty of time to figure this thing out - I got Pep back to normal just fine!”

“I don’t need the ability to spontaneously regrow limbs, okay, I just want to hang onto the limbs I’ve already got, thank you.”

“That’s fine. All I’m saying is that the option is there.”

“The option doesn’t need to be there,” Rhodey says.

“But it can be. If you want it to.”

“You know I came over here to talk to you about the team, right?”

Tony pretends to look around the very much empty compound. “What team?”

“Exactly.”

*

Rhodey isn’t wrong, is the thing. It really is just the two of them, plus Vision sometimes, when he feels like being around - which isn’t always. The next time a serious problem arises, it isn’t going to be a matter of a quick phone call and everyone piling into a quinjet together; a united front. Green smoothies all around to celebrate their collective success, afterwards.

No. 

It’ll be something like this: 

Vision is MIA, Rhodes is six hundred miles in the wrong direction at Wright-Patterson for some dumbass military-brass reason, and Tony is falling down drunk in his shiny private suite at the compound when FRIDAY flashes an alert that there’s been an explosion about three-quarters of the way up the Washington Monument, the energy readings all indicating alien tech.

“ _F-fuck_.”

The first footage Tony can actually focus on is an extremely familiar looking red-and-blue blur launching himself up to the top of the monument. Tony doesn’t have access to cameras inside the elevator shaft. He could get it, definitely, but he’s nowhere near coordinated or clearheaded enough to manage it in time to see what happens in the breathless few minutes that pass between Peter disappearing through the window and a baffled reporter informing viewers that the monument was being evacuated with no casualties reported.

Tony’s first thought is: _Thank fuck the kid’s in DC_.

Tony’s second thought is: _What the fuck is the kid doing in DC?_

It takes about that long for Tony to process that it isn’t the initial volley of an alien attack - no need to ping Vis, call up his suit, fumble indecisively with the brick of a phone with one number in it - just an isolated incident. Probably another idiot messing with Chitauri tech with zero understanding of how it works. DODC and the Feds can handle the cleanup.

It’s fine.

An hour later the gatorade and ibuprofen have started to kick in and Tony has full access to the interior footage of the incident: Peter catching the elevator, catching the girl. 

Something is bugging him about the reports and the footage, but it’s nothing he can put a finger on. Still though, the kid had done a damn good job. 

*

That thing that was bugging him is obnoxiously obvious in the light of day, after a good six-ish hours of sleep. Peter had been at the Washington Monument yesterday, swinging off of helicopters and rescuing endangered civilians. Good. Great.

The tracker in Peter’s suit had been at a 3-star hotel about a mile and a half away.

Tony grins hard enough that his face hurts a little. The little shit had hacked his suit and ditched the tracker.

Okay, from a responsible adult perspective this is not a good thing, Tony is actually aware of that. The tracker is there for a reason: so that if (when) the kid gets into crap that’s over his head, he’ll have backup on hand. No do-or-die desert crucible for Peter; not that Peter had ever needed one to decide to use his considerable talents for the greater good.

Still though, the tracker needed to go back in. Tony doesn’t particularly want to think about what might have happened if the Washington Monument incident really had been the opening salvo of a full scale invasion, Peter standing alone on the front line of it.

Maybe Rhodey is right. Tony needs to stop dwelling on the team that was and look towards re-building. 

Speaking of which - 

“Mr. Parker. Got a sec?”

*

Peter does not have a second, as it turns out, because Peter has managed to fumble his way into the middle of an FBI sting. An FBI sting meant to sew up those niggling little loose ends of the Chitauri tech that keeps popping up in unexpected places and blowing shit up - which is precisely the kind of situation Tony would very much prefer Peter to avoid, Avengers team recruit or no.

Suddenly Peter disabling his tracker is a whole lot less charming and a whole lot more of a liability.

“Casualties?”

“Several reported,” FRIDAY says.

 _Fuck_. “How bad?”

“None fatal, yet. But the ferry is extremely structurally compromised.” She flashes up a few projections on his display, along with the current readings of the water temp of the Hudson and a rough estimate on the number of people on board. 

This was the other thing should have been bothering Tony yesterday - more than forgetting about the tracker data, more than the reminder that the next time the shit hits the fan they’ll be woefully outmanned and outgunned - but this moment, right here. Because Tony knows all too well the high of saving the day; the adrenaline rush of knowing that in the split second difference between tragedy and success, you’d managed to make exactly the right move in exactly the right way to be the big damn hero. Tony had watched the footage from DC with a thrill of sympathetic pride.

What he’d temporarily forgotten was the flipside of that bargain: for every time or two you might manage to win by the skin of your teeth, there was some other time when you came close - but didn’t quite.

If there’s one thing Tony has learned from the past six years, it’s that being able to face up to the losses is significantly more important than facing up to the wins - and while Peter seems perfectly ready to handle saving someone’s life, he has a long damn way to go before he’s ready to handle being responsible for _failing_ to save someone’s life.

“Hi Spider-Man,” Tony says. “Band practice, was it?”

*

The ship doesn’t sink. 

Of course it doesn’t, because Tony brings enough remote-controlled repulsors with him to launch the Staten Island Ferry into the exosphere - if for some reason the need happened to arise. 

“Previously on Peter Screws the Pooch,” Tony says. “I tell you to stay away from this, and instead, you hacked a multimillion-dollar suit so you could sneak around behind my back doing the _one thing_ I told you not to do.”

“Is everyone okay?”

“No thanks to you.”

Peter’s expression changes, like flipping a switch. “No thanks to me? Those weapons were out there, and I tried to tell you about it. But you didn’t listen. None of this would’ve happened if you had just listened to me!

"If you even cared, you’d actually be here.”

Tony steps out of the suit. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t feel just a little bit good to see the kid stumble back a step in response. Always good to know he can still make an entrance.

“I did listen, kid,” Tony says. “Who do you think called the FBI, huh? Do you know that I was the only one who believed in you? Everyone else said I was crazy to recruit a fourteen-year-old - ”

“I’m fifteen.”

“No, this is where you zip it, all right? The adult is talking. What if somebody had died tonight? Different story, right? ‘Cause that’s on you. And if you died, I feel like that’s on me. I don’t need that on my conscience.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes.”

“I - I’m sorry - ”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it.”

“I understand. I just wanted to be like you.”

“And I wanted you to be better.”

He doesn’t actually mean it to come out sounding like accusation. Peter is better; or he will be. But he isn’t there yet, and maybe he never will be if Tony keeps fucking things up like this. 

“Okay, it’s not working out. I’m gonna need the suit back.”

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

“No, no, no. Please, please - ”

“Let’s have it.”

“You don’t understand. Please, this is all I have. I’m nothing without this suit.”

Bit overdramatic, there. Peter is plenty without his suit, but if he doesn’t already know that then all the more reason Tony has to take it back. 

“If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it. Okay? God, I sound like my dad.”

“I don’t have any other clothes.”

“Okay, we’ll sort that out.”

*

There are pictures of Peter, arms outstretched, trying to hold together the Staten Island Ferry with his own body. 

Tony does not pin up those clippings next to the _Amazing Sticky Boy_ one. The pics are a little on the nose with the crucifixion imagery in a way that leaves Tony deeply uneasy.

*

It’s something that shouldn’t mean anything - a watch that shows up on his desk. Tony has a lot of watches. He also has a lot of people looking to butter him up for favors. 

Except this one isn’t pristine. There’s a hairline crack in the watchface, just by the 3, and the band is noticeably worn. It’s a Jaeger-LeCoultre AMVOX, and Tony hasn’t seen it since the clusterfuck that was his 40th birthday party.

It’s stopped at two minutes to midnight, and if Tony’d had any doubts about the source of this little present, that would’ve sealed it. 

Natasha always did have a vaguely creepy sense of humor.

*

Happy seems pretty relieved not to be on kid-watch duty any longer. Unfortunately for Tony, that means Happy is highly motivated and doesn’t have enough to do, and Tony knows from experience that can lead to Pepper getting irate. 

Tony has been trying his level best not to irritate her, since he’s pretty sure her goodwill is the only thing that’s kept their breakup from being an unmitigated PR disaster. He’s not even entirely sure how she managed that.

“How about you take charge of clearing out the tower?” Tony asks Happy.

“You want me to be your moving guy? I thought you already hired people for that.”

“I hired guys to move my very much non-codeword-clearance-rated couch, not the armor prototypes. I need someone in asset management for that. ”

“Fine.”

There, two problems solved. Happy is fully tasked, the tower will be vacated on schedule, and by all indications Peter has actually managed to stay out of trouble for an entire week. Tony is feeling pretty good about this. 

Sure, he’s even farther away from rebuilding the team than he had been a month ago, but on the upside he hasn’t woken up to FRIDAY flashing urgent news alerts at him recently either. The black market Chitauri tech hasn’t been popping up to wreak havoc nearly as much either - the failed FBI sting may have sent the dealers scurrying underground for the foreseeable future. 

All in all, it’s a great time to kick back and work on the fun stuff - like polishing up the design of the waldoes on Peter’s 2.0 suit. 

Because, yes, obviously the mandatory superhero timeout he has Peter on right now was never going to actually be a permanent thing. Peter is too smart, and too strong, and too much of a bleeding heart to stay on the sidelines for long.

Tony would settle for like, a couple of months. Enough time for the Accords shit to settle down a little bit, maybe for him to learn some kind of life lesson about the importance of maintaining a good work/life balance. 

Or something like that.

*

Instead of that, what Peter does is ditch his homecoming date to go fight the nutjob in a wingsuit on Tony’s stealth cargo jet. Which crashes, because of course it does, although thankfully without injuring anyone on the ground. 

Peter had something to do with that, too.

Wingsuit guy - Toomes - is a little worse for wear, when they find him webbed to the neatly stacked boxes of the jet's cargo.

“So you’ve got kids doing your dirty work for you now? Why am I not surprised,” he says when he sees Tony.

“Spider-Man doesn’t work for me.”

“You mean Peter?”

 _Fuck_. 

Fuck fuck fuck.

There’s an easy solution to this problem, of course. Except - 

Tony has seen the footage. The kid had very literally walked through fire to save this asshole’s life, left him webbed up on the beach, safe and sound. You know, the morally upstanding thing. The harder thing, when it would’ve been so much easier and safer to rip off his wings and toss him off the jet, let gravity decide. You know, the kind of thing Tony might have done, in that situation.

Peter is too good to take a life. Or maybe just too young. 

Tony would like to believe it’s the former.

“I get it,” Tony says. “You did it because you had people you were looking out for, people you had to protect, no matter what. I know what it’s like. That’s fine. That’s great, actually - it means I don’t have to do anything drastic, here. Not as long as you keep your mouth shut.”

Tony stops and watches, waiting to make sure his message has been understood.

Toomes is a smart enough guy. He nods.

*

  
Smart as Toomes might be, Peter is smarter. No way the kid vacates the area with an attempted criminal mastermind webbed up literally on top of the shit he was trying to steal.

It doesn't fail to escape Tony's notice that this would be significantly easier if the kid still had his suit. It takes a few minutes of scanning around, but Tony spots him. It helps that he's wearing a familiar red-and-blue onesie, perched on top of the Cyclone. 

Peter hears him coming.

"I did both this time,"

"Did both of what?"

"Priorities one and two. Are they gonna - " Peter looks down at where the Feds are swarming around Toomes. "Do you know what's gonna happen to him?"

"A whole lot of prison, I would expect."

Peter doesn't seem especially gratified by his answer. 

"And by the way, 'sorry about your plane,' really?" Tony asks. "Where did you even get a marker?"

"There's a pocket. In my boot."

The whole deadpan thing is weird, coming from Peter. Tony isn't much of a fan. Then again, three months was actually a pretty long time - most people only lasted a week or two before the shine wore off. The only one who'd lasted longer was Bruce, and he'd set a record at three years before (possibly literally) dropping off the face of the earth.

Well, aside from Pepper, that is. Pepper was an anomaly.

"You did good tonight, kid."

"I know."

*

He gives the kid a ride home, because Peter looks like he's about to nod off right there on the Cyclone. He moves just fine, but there's a certain deliberateness in each step that sets Tony's nerves on edge. Peter had been smacked across the concrete in Leipzig and had bounced back up within a couple minutes. He sits in the passenger seat of the car now with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, one arm draped across his ribs.

"Should I be taking you to a hospital?" Tony asks.

Peter cracks one eye open and looks at him skeptically.

"I'm using 'hospital' loosely, here. A doctor, someone I'd trust to keep quiet."

Peter shakes his head slowly. "Nah, I'm okay. I just need to sleep it off."

Tony pulls over and tries to figure out if this was one of those times when his own so-called adult judgement is supposed to overrule Peter's nearly-adult judgement. Peter doesn't currently seem to be in a significant amount of pain - at least not anymore. Mostly the kid looks tired, and covered in soot.

"You still got that marker on you?" Tony asks.

Peter fishes the marker out of his boot and hands it over, and Tony grabs his wrist before he can pull back, pushing down the sleeve of Peter's hoodie.

"I'd appreciate it," Tony says around the marker cap, "if you didn't go sharing this around with your little nerd friends, okay?"

Peter nods dumbly, watching Tony scrawl his phone number down his arm like he can't parse what's happening.

"But if something happens - if you think you do need a doctor, if you decide to single-handedly take down another jet, whatever. Call me."

"Call you. Not Happy?"

"Not Happy. Wait no - call Happy when a lady buys you a churro, I'm sure he's missed your updates. Call me for the other stuff."

*


End file.
